Photographs from the collection of Halina Kamińska (Mamelok) née Baruch Museum of the history of Polish Jews

Róża Halina née Baruch was called Ziuta in the family. She was born in 1895 as the eldest child of Diana née Wolffsohn and Tadeusz Baruch. She had a sister, Maria Baruch, two years her junior, and a brother, Kazimierz, eight years her junior. Until the beginning of the interwar period when she got married, her life was connected with Pabianice and Łódź. After marrying Józef Mamelok, she moved to Zawiercie, where her husband was a member of management boards of industrial companies.

When the war broke out, the Mameloks came to Warsaw. After a short stay with Halina's brother and his family, the Barlińskis (in the 1920s, Kazimierz changed his surname, just like his mother; his father died in 1918), Halina and Józef Mamelok went to Hrubieszów. It is certain that at that time they were already using the surname Kamiński. They survived the war in the Lublin region and moved to Warsaw afterwards.Their daughter, Magdalena Sokołowska, was a doctor and sociologist; she died in 1989. Towards the end of her life, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Halina Kamińska donated a large part of the family photos she managed to save to her niece, Agnieszka Wróblewska née Barlińska. Halina described some of the photos on their reverse, leaving a valuable clue for the study of this extraordinary collection, when Agnieszka Wróblewska donated it to the POLIN Museum. Unfortunately, many people in the photos could not be identified, but the names of many others are known or have been determined based on various historical contexts. Among them, there are outstanding figures of Łódź (the Baruch, Maybaum / Marzyński families), Częstochowa (the Grossmans), Warsaw: doctors, industrialists, lawyers, journalists; merited social activists.